Rapid Shift

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Three years ago, in New Castle, Pennsylvania, District Attorney Joshua Lamancusa was at a hearing for a 29-year-old who’d been falling behind on his court bills. If he kept missing the payments he risked ending up in jail, so Lamancusa asked him what was going on. “He said he couldn’t get a job. And I asked him, ‘Have you applied?’ …

Four new articles endorse a public bank for LA #YesOnB posted by PUBLIC BANKING INST | 8gb September 13, 2018 Photo courtesy Public Bank LA Los Angeles’ ballot initiative for public banking continues to generate many excellent articles about public banking. Their cogent arguments apply to public banking in general, but as Phoenix Goodman writes in the LA Progressive, “Rarely does the constituency of a city …

In a $5.5 billion sweetheart deal, Amazon has inserted itself between local businesses and local governments. BY David Dayen, In These Times, July 2018 The paper the forms are printed on at City Hall. The desk your child sits at in math class. The books in your local library. Amazon has begun to profit from all of these products, extending its business …

By David Roberts@drvoxdavid@vox.com Jun 21, 2017Young families typically leave cities for the suburbs. Here’s how to keep them downtown. Urbanist Brent Toderian explains how Vancouver held onto its families. Elementary school and playground in downtown Vancouver. (Brent Toderian) In North America, we take it for granted: When couples have kids, they move out of the city to the suburbs. The trend has only …

BY EILLIE ANZILOTTI Fast Company 01.10.18 Imagining The Adaptable, Sensor-Filled Street Of The Future To get there, we need technologists to think more like urban planners, and for urban planners to think more like technologists–and for the two sectors to work together. Conversations about our future cities and streets hinge around smart, interconnected technologies: Think sensors that monitor the progress of autonomous vehicles, stoplights that …

7 Nov 2017 by Steve Hanley on Clean Technica Last week, the annual National Climate Report stated that all the increase in average global temperatures since 1950 is attributable to human activity. This week, a lawsuit has been filed in federal court in Philadelphia claiming the federal government has a duty to protect its citizens from injury or death due to climate change. The plaintiffs …

In time Jones turned away from the search for systematic design methods. He realized that academic attempts to systematize design led, in practice, to the separation of reason from intuition and failed to embody experience in the design process. Jones called for the re-introduction of personal judgement, imagination, and aesthetic sensibility into the design process. He came to believe in ‘reversing …

WePower is creating a new cryptocurrency to help facilitate a more democratic system of funding and buying renewable energy. Fast Company, Oct 2017. “The end goal is to produce a true peer to peer energy platform, where people would sell renewable energy and also be able to get energy back from the grid.” [Photo: Sebastian Kanczok] BY BEN SCHILLER Residential solar customers are …